


Stash

by orphan_account



Series: - xo RA - [2]
Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: F/F, Implied Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-23
Updated: 2015-09-23
Packaged: 2018-04-23 00:36:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4856495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I, uh, didn’t know you ever ended up using that camera,” Max sputtered. “You should’ve told me, you know - I would’ve loved to see your work sooner.” </p><p>Maybe if Chloe hadn’t caught sight of some of her favorite photos of Rachel resting under Max’s thumb, she would’ve gotten away with pretending she’d only seen the bullshit test pictures she took while testing the camera out rather than a half a dozen near-nudes. Maybe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stash

**Author's Note:**

> For an anon and a kind user on Tumblr who requested more of the AmberPriceField trio.
> 
> No Rachel directly in this one, but she's there in spirit. And image.

It wasn’t unusual for Max to be shuffling around by herself in Chloe’s room, prying fingers digging deep into drawers and boxes and closets alike in hopes of wasting some time. It was in her nature as a photographer to be a snoop, and what else was a girl to do when her best friend’s famous “give me a minute” line always translated into “give me, like, twenty or thirty minutes”? It’s not like Chloe’s room offered any real entertainment value aside from staring at the unique _modern art_ she’d ravaged her walls with.

Besides, it’s not like she ever gave Max any more than a blink and a nod while watching the girl rifle through her drawers when she barely laid five feet away. Chloe thought it was weird, sure, but just marked it up as a quirk; some kind of nosy need-to-see-and-document everything thing, and never gave it much thought past that.

But now, Max is kneeling on the floor next to Chloe’s bed, hands reaching under a worn mattress in search of something familiar: a torn up shoebox; survived years beyond its expiration date and stuffed far fuller than it should be. The wear on the box had given light to just how many times Chloe had been inside this thing; and Max easily deduced it was of sentimental valuable to Chloe. She felt a little evil with the thing in her grasp, wondering how she may have felt if Chloe stumbled upon something secret of hers. As if she had anything of the sort.

Her inquisitive nature does get the best of her, though, and she kneels next to the box and sets it atop her lap. The thought of giving Chloe some privacy once again flickers across her mind, but when she recalls the time Chloe blatantly went digging through her underwear drawer and making fun of all of her granny panties - she practically tosses the top off of the box, eager to scour through its contents.

Naturally, the first thing she spots inside is a photo of Chloe and Rachel. Somehow, this stings. She pushes the feeling aside along with several other papers, sifting through a messy pile of polaroids and printed-out pictures on cut out stock paper. Littered amongst the pictures were old letters, scraps of doodles from when they were children, but none of that interested her right now.

What had really caught her eye were the photos she hadn’t seen before; all of them developed on a film that she had become _very_ familiar with. If Max wasn’t mistaken, it was the very same film used by the camera Chloe had given to her when she returned to Arcadia Bay.

Putting two and two together, Max concluded that these were photos Chloe took herself, and she positively lit up in delight. She shoved as many of them as she could manage into her tiny hands, sifted them around until they were somewhat orderly, and began paging through them like flashcards.

The first few photos were, admittedly, pretty shitty. Blurry shots of the junkyard with her and Rachel’s lair somewhere in the background. A picture of the train-tracks descending into the horizon, but off-centered and focused on some uninteresting patch of grass instead. As Max continued to pry through the pile, though, she noticed a shift in the subjects of Chloe’s works: though the pictures were mostly out of order, the frequency of scenery shots had decreased and the focus shifted towards portraits. More people, less things. Max smiled bitterly. At least Chloe had found some people decent enough that they were worth documenting when she wasn’t around.

There was a photo of Justin, wielding a massive bong as if it were a battle-axe. There was one of Trevor, kneeling on the ground next to some other boy, hands locked together in some frat-boy pose. There was one of Rachel, half-hidden behind a solo-cup and flashing the camera an especially flirtatious smile.

And then there was another one of Rachel.

And another.

And _another_.

Max began to sense a pattern, and then it all clicked.

Chloe Price had been keeping an entire hidden stash of pictures of Rachel Amber hidden in a secret box under her bed. She had literally been collecting photos of her crush and hiding them so she could look at them when she wasn’t around. That was the most high school girl thing Max could’ve ever possibly imagined - and from Chloe? Unbelievable.

She felt mild jealousy that that could’ve been her in those pictures, that she could’ve been the one solidifying memories with Chloe over all those years. She knew she had time to make up for it, though. There would always be more opportunities.

As she continued to ogle the pictures, she found herself mesmerized with the subject before her eyes. Rachel really did have a talent for modeling. It made sense that she and Chloe talked about their L.A. dreams so much.

One thing that really stood out to Max was that all the photos of Rachel seemed to have been taken in Chloe’s room. There was no professional lighting, no back-drops - and yet, given the circumstances, they were gorgeous. For a Blackwell dropout, Chloe really did have an eye for composition. Her photographs captured the entire essence that was Rachel Amber: charming, sweet, and enigmatic.

In every photo, she looked like a different brand of flawless - every pose was precise, every wink, every angle, it was all the work of an absolute professional. All the work of someone who knew just what she was doing, and how to do it well. She had talent. The both of them did.

Max’s face dropped for a moment, feeling very self-conscious about her own work.

It took a mere second before the feeling was replaced with something entirely different after having paged her way halfway through the stack.

Max Caulfield was positively stunned at the sight in front of her.

The focus of this photo was a particularly sultry looking Rachel Amber, her eyes glistening and lids lowered and lips pouting outwards. But more noticeably, it was Rachel Amber stripped down to her underwear with one hand tangled up deep in her blonde hair and the fingertips of the other teasing the waistline of her panties.

Max could feel her jaw slowly sink agape, and her neck to her ears was certainly flushed with embarrassment. She was definitely not supposed to see this, not supposed to be down here - but she couldn’t manage to look away. Did Rachel pose like this for everyone? Or was this a private thing? Is this why Chloe never mentioned that she took them in the first place?

“Yo, Max!”

Bursting through the door, boot-first, came one Chloe Price, who stomped into her room with all the grace of an elephant.

It took a half a second for her to notice Max desperately trying to slip the photos back into some kind of order and back towards the box they came from, shaking like a leaf and pointedly avoiding eye contact. She absolutely prayed that if she hunched over the box just the right way, Chloe wouldn’t see what she was doing.

But of course she did, and she had no doubts about what Max must’ve found. Any ordinary person may have felt angry at this. The feeling of having their privacy violated, the betrayal of Max trying to hide it from her, unfair and deceitful: but the smirk Chloe wore on her face stunk of nothing but sheer amusement. Knowing what she knew, she was determined to torture Max to the fullest extent possible.

“What’cha got there, Maximus?”

Max’s posture jolted upright at the question, her hands stilling and only barely moving her head towards Chloe. “I, uh, didn’t know you ever ended up using that camera,” she sputtered. “You should’ve told me, you know - I would’ve loved to see your work sooner.” Smooth, Caulfield.

Maybe if Chloe hadn’t caught sight of some of her favorite photos of Rachel resting under Max’s thumb, she would’ve gotten away with pretending she’d only seen the bullshit test pictures she took while testing the camera out instead of a half a dozen near-nudes. Maybe.

“Yeah?” Chloe took her time in sauntering towards Max, leaning over to get a better look at the images Max had tried to censor with her fingers. “We can look through ‘em together, if you want.” she offerred, squatting down next to Max, who was at an absolute loss for words for a good fifteen seconds.

“Are you sure? I mean, if you kept them down here, maybe you don’t want to, and I don’t want to make you uncomfortable… I mean, any more than I already probably have by going through your stuff, and - “

Chloe had already torn the pictures out of Max’s hand by that point, spreading them out on the floor beneath them. “Chillax, Max. Yeah, it’s true, I did some work with Dad’s camera before passing it onto you. Nothing too good, though.”

She seemed entirely unaffected by the clear sight of several entirely inappropriate spreads of Rachel laid out right in front of her best friend.

Max couldn’t decide whether it would be more awkward if she made a comment about them, or if she didn’t. She closed her eyes tight, and mentally flipped a coin. When she opened them, she gave it her best shot.

“Rachel’s a pretty good model.” she stuttered, quietly, making sure her gaze didn’t linger on any particular photograph for too long.

“Damn right,” Chloe agreed, pressing the tip of her forefinger to one specific photo: Rachel splayed out on her bed, hand draped across her stomach, black lingerie contrasting her fair skin.

“Y-yeah,” Max nodded. “That’s a pretty good one.”

“You like those kind of photos?” Chloe’s eyes were set straight on Max, and she could feel them despite never daring to look away from the pile in front of them.

She swallowed a hard lump in her throat.

“I mean, I do,” she started, anxiety brewing in the deepest pits of her stomach. “The intimacy that can be captured in situations like that, the trust you have to have with someone else to spend this kind of time with them at their most exposed. And to try to capture someone's entire being in such a personal moment - setups like this always produce incredible work.” She was thankful her passion for photography gave her the ability to stumble out just the right amount of words to avoid admitting that yes, she _had_ been enjoying checking Rachel out. But she had no desire to voice that out loud. 

(Not yet, at least.)

“Wow, Max,” Chloe laughed; reaching over to give her friend an affectionate rub of her hair. “That’s pretty sappy, even for a geek like you.” She stared back down at the photos, eyelids lowering. She gave a hum of deep thought. “Trust and intimacy, huh? Never thought of it like that.”

“Well, yeah,” Max continued, boldly pushing a few individual pictures towards the center. “You’ve really got to care about someone to trust them enough to be alone with them in a situation like this, don’t you?”

Chloe considered the thought for a moment, lips pursed together into an unusually silent thoughtfulness.

“So, since you have William’s camera now, I guess it’s your turn to take the pics, huh? You totally need some shots of me, you know. I don't show up nearly enough on your dorm-wall.”

“I _have_ been taking pictures. Every day,” Max reminds her, surprised she even needs to. “You’re the one nagging me to put my - _William's_ \- camera down every ten seconds, remember?”

“No, no,” Chloe clarified, placing a blue nail upon a photo of Rachel. She’s lingerie-clad and giving the camera her best come-hither look. “I mean like those. Bet a nerd like you would flip at a chance to snap some sweet pics like that, huh?”

Max’s heart skips a beat, and she devotes all of her body’s functions towards processing what she’s fairly certain Chloe had just proposed to her. “Would... you really be okay with me taking of pictures of you like...” Max toyed with the sleeves of her hoodie nervously, uncertainty tainting her every word. “Like that?”

Chloe grinned, abandoning the piles of photos in flavor of flopping herself onto her bed. She wasted no time in settling herself into the most clichéd and over-dramatic seductive pose she could think of. “Oh, yeah,” she crooned, a faux-seductive voice that had Max giggling at the very sound. “Make me look like, the absolute sexiest. As if I’m not already. _I_ , for one, think it could be fun.”

Max shuffled the pile together again, getting ready to put them back into the box. Chloe noticed the particularly lengthy final stare she gave them.

“Unless,” Chloe propped herself up onto her elbows, staring down at Max over the side of the bed. “You’d rather take pics of Rachel.”

Max’s breath hitched in her throat.

“I mean, I totally get if you would,” Chloe sighed dreamily, smilingly fondly as she recalled her own photoshoots with the model: all spontaneous, intense, and hot. “She’d totally love to model for you, Max.”

“ _Really_?” The very moment that barely-hidden enthusiasm slipped through Max's lips had her regretting saying anything at all. To sound so _obviously_ thrilled at the idea had immediately rendered her flustered to the point of silence.  Chloe, on the other hand, couldn't stop beaming. She fully well knew Rachel would be more than willing to be Max's subject - the two had discussed their plans for the photographer more than she'd ever know. 

“Oh, yeah,” Chloe affirmed, folding her arms behind her head. “But passing up the chance to shoot a babe like me would be a total waste on your part, too.” She turned herself onto her side to better face Max, lips twisting up into an enticing grin. “So, really, if I were you, I’d want to do the both of us together.”

Max nodded. She absolutely did.

**Author's Note:**

> I need to think of a more chronological progression of the relationship between these three.
> 
> Critique is always accepted and appreciated.


End file.
